Rise and Shine: Friends with Benefits and Another Earth

Ever since That ’70s Show, I’ve thought that Mila Kunis is a movie star waiting to happen. But where was the big-screen role that would launch her? Black Swan came close. She was funny and mysterious as Natalie Portman’s beaming rival—she deserved the Oscar far more than scenery-munching Melissa Leo—but finally it wasn’t her movie. The hilarious comedy Friends with Benefits is.

Kunis plays Jamie, a brassy Manhattan headhunter who’s just been dumped by her boyfriend (Andy Samberg). Hired by GQ to find a new art director, she settles on Dylan (Justin Timberlake), a fussy, emotionally distant Angeleno who himself has just been dumped (by Emma Stone). Jamie and Dylan hit it off right away, but because both have been wounded in love, they decide to try a relationship that avoids the usual romcom clichés (spoofed by a movie-within-the-movie starring Jason Segel and Rashida Jones). If you’ve read the title, you know what kind of relationship they decide on. You also know that in Hollywood, when couples say they’re entering a relationship with no strings attached (the title, you may recall, of a similar comedy earlier this year), love will soon be jerking them around like puppets.

While formulaic, Friends with Benefits is skillfully done—though you may not think so at first. The opening ten or fifteen minutes, especially Jamie’s and Dylan’s breakups, are so coarse and clumsy I wanted to walk out. And the digital photography is disgracefully shoddy, particularly for a movie that’s hoping to glamorize New York and L.A. Yet once Jamie and Dylan get together, things click. The screenplay gets wittier, director Will Gluck (Easy A) finds an easy comic rhythm, and we start enjoying a whole range of deft supporting performances—Woody Harrelson’s unexpected turn as GQ’s gay sports editor, Jenna Elfman’s warm work as Dylan’s sister, and Patricia Clarkson’s uproarious bit as Jamie’s unreliable mother, a superannuated child of the seventies.

Best of all, Kunis and Timberlake turn out to have terrific chemistry. While not a great actor, Timberlake is an engaging screen presence, deft with a joke, who’s perfect as Dylan, an amiable, self-protective guy who prefers to live his life in the emotional shallows. For her part, Kunis isn’t one of those shrinking-violet actresses whom we’re supposed to like because they’re so blandly nice. We like her because she makes Jamie so vibrantly alive. Whether delivering a wisecrack with immaculate timing or revealing the vulnerability behind those big eyes, Kunis is simply electric—we can see her stardom being born.

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Photo: Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures

When Another Earth played at Sundance earlier this year, everyone left talking about its lead actress and co-writer, Brit Marling. You could hardly blame them. Talented and radiant, she’s the gravitational force that pulls together this moody science-fiction picture.

Marling plays Rhoda Williams, a brainy high school student who’s celebrating her acceptance into MIT’s astrophysics program on the night mankind discovers a doppelgänger of planet Earth. Distracted by the night sky—and tipsy—she slams into the car of a famous composer, John Burroughs (William Mapother, best known as Ethan on Lost). The crash kills Burroughs’s family and leaves him in a coma. Four years later, the grief- and guilt-stricken Rhoda gets out of jail, takes a job as a janitor, and sets about remaking her life. She applies for a seat on a rocket going to Earth 2 (as it’s known), a planet that isn’t merely identical to our Earth but is inhabited by our human doubles. More important, she looks up Burroughs, now a boozing wreck, and without his knowing her true identity tries to help him get back on his feet.

Although Another Earth is haunted by the sight of a duplicate Earth looming in the sky, Marling and director/co-writer Mike Cahill aren’t interested in the usual sci-fi hokum about aliens blowing the White House to smithereens. Closer in spirit to Solaris than Armageddon, they use Earth 2’s parallel reality as a metaphor for confronting ourselves and discovering the possibility of living differently. Rhoda tries to do both, and what keeps her story from becoming cliché is that she not only seeks redemption (which is all about purifying her own individual soul) but wants to provide restitution to the man she so horribly wronged (she thinks his life matters as much as hers).

It would spoil things to say how her efforts play out, but it’s worth noting that Another Earth is not one of those annoying Sundance movies that exist solely to help those who made it get other, bigger jobs. It’s about something. And if it doesn’t approach the cinematic heights of Lars von Trier’s brilliantly dark Melancholia (another film about a planet unexpectedly appearing overhead), it’s still an impressive feature debut for Cahill. Working with modest means, he creates an alluring sense of the uncanny, wins a fine performance from the underrated Mapother, and has the good sense to know that in Marling, he’s got a lovely, soulful actress who, like Kunis, is impossible not to watch. Just keep the camera on her, and everything will be fine.